Line Segment: A Life, or From Here to B

You’re born a line segment, starting at Point A. Your mother, a line segment herself, keeps losing you when you rotate out of her plane, twisting into a tiny point at the playground, at the school bus stop, in the grocery store. You keep doing it just to get her riled up because it’s fun, and she keeps telling you to straighten up.

During high school, you get a job at the bowling alley as one of the scratch lines. In college, you major in Linear Algebra with a minor in Theater. You love watching the different curvilinear shapes around campus. In Theater Arts 200, you get the lead in From Here to Eternity, playing a Ray opposite a gifted freshmen actress, O, who is a circle from Kansas, plain and simple but brilliant, perfect.

You’re restless. Keep thinking about rays and boundaries and possibilities and no endings. When winter arrives and everybody couples up on campus to make snow angels on the lawn, their arms and legs go up and down, up and down. Then they jump up and look proudly at their celestial handiwork—two identical angels holding wings in the soft snow. But you don’t have any arms to make the wings. You and O do the best you can and when you two hop up, the snow looks like this:

| O

You and O talk all night about things like binary. Its unbounded possibilities. O encourages you to pursue your dreams in the theater. The two of you move to New York City, where she gets a graduate degree in Spheres at Columbia and you land a job as half of the X that someone famous stands on to deliver his opening monologue on late night TV. Later, you get a role in an off-off Broadway production playing someone who used to be famous’s cane, but mostly you sit around watching TV and drinking beer, feeling flat. You return to Linear Algebra to pay the bills and start a family.

You and O start to take each other for granted. She always ends up at the same place; you tire of her constantly repeating herself, over and over. You trudge along doing matrices in your cubicle at work. You try to shake things up a little, but you’re unable to veer off course. You’re stuck.

What’s the point, you wonder, with B looming?

You rotate out of the plane you’ve built with your family.

It happens slowly. Nobody notices, especially you.

The kids all scatter into new planes of their own.

You try The Infinity Church.

You see a Point Therapist. She asks you things like:

If X, why not X?
If B, why not B?

Absolute time moves past you.__________________________ You think not of B so much anymore, but of A, sometimes, and what was before that. You discover something like a harmonic progression, which offers some inward infinity. You take a turn.